I would like to let you know about a new project which I have started, which is based on an idea by Ante Wessels: a Wiki for KDE. The 'working draft' name for this project is "KDE Community Wiki Site" (KDE CWS) and you can find the site which is more than just a Wiki at kde.ground.cz.

It is based on the very powerful and feature rich TikiWiki CMS. The interface is multilingual and content can be in almost any language too (uses utf-8). Registered user can set up many settings in their preferences including site layout and style (users can even make their customized versions of available styles).

Everyone is welcome to join and participate on the content. The main idea is
to share KDE users' and developers' experience. Every registered user is able to create, edit and modify the content of Wiki pages. It's fast and easy.

What's planned? Making it much better than it's now (btw: I'm one of the 100
TikiWiki developers, so it's not just a 'plain sentence'), better accessibility and xhtml 1.0 strict compliance, better and more compatible CSS styles (KDE.org style would be nice too) and of course more and more KDE related content (devel, documentation, ideas, everything is needed)...

Any comments, questions or suggestions are welcome. This is a test which
depends on you.

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I was proposing on the French Translation Team two days ago to create a Wiki to put our always half-finished translation Howto and various information that is now buried in the mailing list archive. I didn't know of your project and I'm very happy that you did this. My guess is that we could reach a wiki of 10-20 pages for the French translators.

I was thinking for the French translation team of something simpler that TikiWiki like MoinMoin but your site looks much nicer that anything I could do. Would it be possible to create some sub-wikis for the different translation teams : something like kde.ground.cz/i18n/french with our own hierarchy of pages, sandbox and index. Everything will be in French in these pages so I don't think it should be indexed in the global English index.

i think since TikiWiki is "multilingual", uses utf-8 encoding and has the ability to switch the language of interface to french too, you can feel free to put these pages to KDE CWS and we can make an own structure to them...

otherwise i think it would be better to set up your own Tiki under some *.fr domain instead of making sub-wiki

I think there is no problem with pages in french, if they start with their own main page. It is good to keep the site together, for the critical mass of contributors needed to make it work. I would welcome such topics! And then, you make the work you do more visible.

While I certainly applaude the initiative, sites like these tend to get announced and then die slowly. For instance, who remembers the KDE Wiki announced at http://dot.kde.org/1045070317/1045254304/ anymore?

I wish something official could be arranged, or at least make an alias URL like http://wiki.kde.org for this Wiki -- to keep it alive and popular!

Wikis are positively a lot more than hype. Just look at http://www.wikipedia.org -- a collaborative encyclopedia with some 120.000 well-written articles of all topics. Anyone can edit articles without even registering, and it still works, not in spite of this, but because of it. When a Wiki reaches a "critical mass" of popularity, it Just Works and becomes an invaluable source of live documentation. To reach this mass is why I really think a KDE Wiki should be official, and as you say, linked to from other KDE sites etc.

I don't know why it should be a problem to get a second level domain which includes "kde" like kde-look.org, kde-forum.org and kdedevelopers.org do. There will be no problem with KDE e.V. if "kde" is properly used. I see potential problems if Wiki content is presented as third level domain under kde.org, more than when it is only linked from kde.org. And a link is likely if there is useful content (which I yet miss in this Wiki) in future.

It's just a waste of money and other resources. Getting wiki.kde.org shouldn't have to be so hard IMHO, when the people behind the site just want to help the project and organise a community beneficial to KDE.

It is possible to make articles with spaces! You link to them by using brackets. IIRC "((link to a page with spaces))" should work. Actually my small additions to the KDE Wiki contained links with spaces but someone changed them :-(

Actually, they're not articles, they're wiki pages. "SomethingPutTogether" is a common convention to title pages in Wiki world (it's then used e.g. to simple link to another page). I've changed in site settings to the "strict naming" to keep some consistency, but if there will be more requests to have Wiki pages named with spaces (can cause problems with URLs in some browsers) i can switch it back to "full".

The great and honorable Wikipedia uses a different system:
Wiki pages are marked with double angle brackets,
and the names can contain spaces. I don't know
what problems with certain browsers you are referring to
(as someone already pointed out spaces should work
if properly encoded).

I have a question, why a registration to be able to modify content? I thought that the idea of a Wiki is that everyone can change everything and rampage is to be reverted by the serious majority of contributors.

Before I knew Wikipedia I would have agreed with your arguments. But now I think Wikipedia shows that anonymous edits work pretty good. The amount of vandalism is small and many people start with Wikipedia by fixing some typos--which they wouldn't do if they had to create an account first.

IMHO one should at least try allowing anonymous edits and if one finds that it does not work switch back.

Does it not have a history so you can resurrect old versions if someone went berserk? I have only used one wiki so far which depended on MySQL as a backend and allowed the maintainer to revert to older versions of a page.

That would be a mistake. Wiki's are disorganized and/or have lame URLs with StuddlyCapsAndNoSpacesOrLame_Underscores_InThem. Do you also suggest we break all the existing links to developer.kde.org by removing developer.kde.org?

This seems to be the right platform to create and maintain a up-to-date KDE Frequently Asked Questions (but please only add common questions *with* answers). http://www.kde.org/documentation/faq/ seems to be very outdated.